Matt Haughey has a great article on how he uses Movable Type to do it all (apparently, Kottke does too… can't wait to see his article).

Anyhow, I wanted to share a tidbit in that vein. I've just set this up recently, and I'm in the process of moving the rest of my static content to use it. What I did: • Created a new Movable Type blog and named it "bradchoate.com: Static Content". • Deleted all the Index templates. • Deleted all the archive templates, except for the Individual archive template. • Made sure individual archives were enabled. • Made the archive path the root...

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It's been fun to watch Mark Pilgrim enjoying the time saving benefits of the plugins I've written lately. It's even popped up on the Daypop 40 (in spite of the title including the phrase "regular expressions" no less)! Daring Fireball was inspired to take the smart-quote thing a step further. Fully documented in their post Movable Type Smart Quote Devilry. Educate your quotes.

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LinkEntryToFile is a plugin that modifies the interface of Movable Type. When the plugin is installed, you can specify a file on your server to link to the Entry Body or Extended Entry field. The linked file will be kept in sync with the entry, so that you can edit it in an external editor.

This plugin basically takes MT's handy "Link this template to a file" feature and applies it to entries. When using MT to manage certain types of content, especially content that contains extensive HTML formatting, it's useful to be able to use your favorite text-editing application, with syntax highlighting, Undo, search and replace, etc., without having to repeatedly copy and paste into the MT entry...

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Now that Movable Type supports a real database with the MySQL support in version 2.2, it's time for some new tags that can let you select entries, comments and categories using any criteria you'd like. Click the 'more' link for full docs and download link.

Availability

You can download this plugin here: mtsql-1_52.zip

Installation

To install, place the 'sql.pl' file in your Movable Type 'plugins'...

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It's a shame MT doesn't provide year-based archives because some of us have enough entries for them even if Movable Type hasn't been out that long! Here's what my 2001 blogging year looks like. Well, you can create them manually-- and since you only have to do it once a year, it isn't too bad. Click the 'more' link for details...

All you have to do to build a year archive is create an index template...

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MainMenuRecent is a plugin that modifies the interface of Movable Type. When the plugin is installed, MT's Main Menu will display the three most recent entries for each weblog.

Requirements

MainMenuRecent requires the BigPAPI plugin, which is included with the MainMenuRecent distribution.

MainMenuRecent is compatible with MT 3.16 and higher. However, the Settings are only available under MT 3.2.

Installation

To install the MainMenuRecent plugin, upload the file MainMenuRecent.pl to the plugins directory within your Movable Type directory. If BigPAPI.pl is not already present in your plugins directory, upload that as well.

Terms of Use

MainMenuRecent is available free of charge under a Creative Commons license....

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Question

Someone commented on or sent a trackback to my blog, and I never received the notification email.

Answer

Note: There was a bug introduced in version 3.14 which prevented notifications for moderated comments from being sent out. Please upgrade to version 3.16 or higher to eliminate this bug as a possible cause for this issue.

Check Settings

• Make sure you have specified a valid email address in your Author Profile.

• Make sure you have checked the appropriate options on the Settings > Feedback screen for Email notification, for both Comments...

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Allows you to take any reference to a scripture and have it automatically link to the Bible text at Bible Gateway. Type John 3:16 into your entry and those words turn into John 3:16.

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A good friend is often one's harshest critic. This came to mind while reading this post Jason Kottke writes about the "New Internet" and, more specifically, Six Apart's role in creating "a black hole for creative people". I can feel comfortable in debating his opinion because I respect Jason as a friend and a peer and, in the past, have questioned him privately on his opinion of what makes a respectable company. Because of this relationship and my respect of his opinion, I've decided to break the perceived Six Apart oath of silence (you should see the initiation ritual!) and respond to his post.

Jason writes:

A person who -- when she was unemployed 3 years ago -- could spend a couple...

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The following new Movable Type plugins are now available. Click-through to read more about them: • Custom Post-Processing Handler • Proper Case Global Tag Attribute • Regex Global Tag Attribute

You can download these using the following links: • Custom Post-Processing Handler: mtpostproc-1_3.zip • Proper Case Global Tag Attribute: mtpropcase-1_2.zip • Regex Global Tag Attribute: mtregex-1_6.zip

Enjoy!

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If you're lazy like me, you'd like to link to Amazon items and put your associate ID in there, but who remembers that URL format? With publishing systems like Movable Type, you shouldn't have to remember, so let's make MT do the work for us.

Ingredients: • 1 MT-Macro plugin • 1 MT-IfEmpty plugin • 1 MT-Regex plugin

Technique:

Define a pattern to match the Amazon URL (today they use the www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/ASINCODE/… So we use this to transform the regular Amazon link into an associate link: <$MTSetVar name="amazon_id"...

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Movable Type weblogs require some level of maintenance, beyond just adding new content. Here are some suggestions that can help keep your blog running smoothly. If you have other suggestions not on this list, please let us know in the comments section.

Dead Links

If you link to any other websites from your blog, and or have comments or TrackBacks enabled, you need to periodically scan your site to make sure that your external links are still active. Links with URLs that are no longer valid give a "404" server error when someone clicks on them.

One of the biggest deadlink culprits can come from TrackBack links. Periodically click on the "TrackBack" button on the left side of...

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Power Tools is one central place to get lots of open source code and components that Six Apart's team has released. Power Tools help you build better sites, apps, and platforms and to connect your applications to the rest of the web.

Most Power Tools code is released under open source licenses, making it possible to build on the work here in your own applications and services. Note: Power Tools are provided as technology demonstrations for our community, but we can't offer technical support for their use, installation, or configuration.

Plugins

• StyleCatcher 1.01: StyleCatcher is a simple but powerful plugin built for Movable Type 3.2 that lets you easily swap out any one of...

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Related Entries Revisited. Adam Kalsey puts the power of MySQL full-text indexing and MT-SQL to work to provide a better "related entries" solution for Movable Type. A great example of how to use the <MTSQLEntries>

tag.

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This plugin provides a couple of new tags to enhance Movable Type calendar publishing.

Availability

You can download this plugin from here: mtcalx-1_1.zip

Requirements

The following are requirements for using this plugin: • Movable Type 2.21 or later

Installation

To install, place the 'calx.pl' file in your Movable Type 'plugins' directory. The 'calx.pm' file should be placed in a 'bradchoate'...

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Question

A list of all known issues in the latest version of Movable Type. Please be sure to review this list before using the product or opening a support ticket.

Answer

As of Version 3.16, released April 18, 2005 • Configuration • A new application method ("app_path") prevents the login cookie from being set when Movable Type is installed in the root folder, rather than a subfolder. See Keep getting login screen for the solution. • Archives • It is impossible to produce files with no file extension by using the File extension for archive...

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Question

Various errors of this type, what they mean, and the solutions.

Answer

Error: Use of uninitialized value in string eq at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 316.

This is related to the display of the Movable Type News Feed on the main page. Your server is most likely having trouble retrieving this feed.

You can disable this feature in mt-config.cgi1 file with the following line: NewsboxURL disable

Remember to edit mt-config.cgi only in a plain text editor, and upload it back to your server in ASCII mode after making changes.

Error: Use of uninitialized...

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Introduction

This article explains how you can customize the user interface of the Movable Type application. This is a powerful area of functionality that's easy to get started with and almost unlimited in its potential.

Some key points we'll cover: • How to create custom application templates for Movable Type's interface • The benefits of using application templates • Ideas for how to use application templates with your plugins or workflow • Links to some example application templates, to see what's possible and to inspire your own

Customizing the Movable Type user interface

To understand the potential of customizing your Movable Type interface, you'll need a little bit of background....

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John Gruber found (as I did recently) that the Movable Type RSS 0.91 template doesn't validate using the new RSS validator (kudos to Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby for developing the tool. Mine validates now.). John offers a way to fix it using a new custom plugin, <$MTrfc822BlogTimeZone$>. For those that already have my Regex plugin installed, you can do this instead: <lastBuildDate><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryDate format="%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S"$> <$MTBlogTimezone regex="s/://"$></MTEntries></lastBuildDate> <pubDate><$MTDate format="%a, %d %b %Y...

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01.18.2005

Movable Type 'nofollow' plugin

Today we are pleased to announce our full support for the rel="nofollow" attribute to hyperlinks introduced to address the main cause of weblog spam: the payoff of higher placement in search engine results.

This initiative, with announced support from Google, Yahoo, MSN (and surely more to come), will direct search engines to ignore links with this attribute set for the purposes of spidering or increasing search engine relevance or ranking.

For current users of Movable Type (note: this plugin is included by default starting with version 3.16), this support is implemented as a simple plugin ( zip [4K], tar/gzip [3K]-- tested on MT 3.x and MT 2.661). For most users enabling "nofollow" support involves placing a single file in your plugins directory. All links submitted by external users in comments and TrackBacks will then be modifed to add the...

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